Now they stand to make huge returns of 3 to 5x for being correct on that bet, while, of course, consumers get nothing. Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
For the nonbelievers: why did only a company led by close relatives of a government member and no other bet on a game that is based on a Court decision?
Via Newsweek, Cantor Fitzgerald has affirmed it “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.”
https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...
- https://www.wired.com/story/cantor-fitzgerald-trump-tariff-r...
So we don't really know, someone is lying. I'd prefer to let the congressional investigation play out, but if I had to guess right now I would believe Wired over Cantor Fitzgerald.
I can't prove that there was any White House advisory memo before the tariffs were announced, but hypothetically, would this not be considered material nonpublic information? It seems the same as a corporate insider dumping stock because a company lawyer privately told them "we're definitely going to lose this case".
Was the hypothetical "White House advisory memo" produced using any proprietary information? If not, why should it be any different than if I hired a bunch of top lawyers to produce a private report for me?
In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...
This is a strong case that there ought not to be any such thing as a secret opinion or confidential advice from the White House OLC - and I agree with that opinion if that's what you're saying.
But it doesn't transform the information contained therein to nonpublic.
I'm not saying this whole thing wasn't a total scumbag move - it was - but it's not quite the same crime as insider trading.
The legal opinion itself was non public? If they couldn't use that they would first have to put up the money to pay the legal fees to find out how likely their bet was to pay off.
And just to put this in writing too, I would be shocked if we don't find out later that a lot of the volatility was a way for a few people to make a lot of money. You can make a lot of money when there's more volatility. So all the flip flopping on tariffs yes/no might very well be manipulating markets...
yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject. It would have been completely insane if the white house staff didn't believe the same. So I guess I'm actually surprised at the white house staff believing what everybody else did?
That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....
You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.
And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.
Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.
The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.
We have no reason to believe that if such a memo exists it was used improperly, but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.
BTW you've got an extra Justice on the Supreme Court. Should be 6-3, not 7-3.
You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.
It's a public arena on things like this. I don't think even the justices themselves have "material inside information" until a little ways through the hearing, and people are trying to predict the outcome well before that. On the surface that might sound absurd, but it isn't.
But expert advice, even if material, is not the same as insider information.
If you go to a random lawyer in Wyoming and ask them to write "expert opinion" then what you'll get would probably be something standard, written by a junior associate, or maybe even produced by ChatGPT.
If the White House orders "expert opinion" on potential Supreme Court ruling then the chances are that the expert asked to prepare it is someone who plays golf with some of the SCOTUS judges.
So those two "expert opinions" might not bear the same weight.
Why not?
(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)
And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)
In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.
That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.
This time I won't say maybe - that's a straw man.
I never said Cantor shouldn't be able to do anything that even gives the appearance of a conflict. Or anything even close to that really.
As you said yourself further up the thread, investments of investment bank employees are highly regulated. And not only employees themselves, but also their immediate family members.
Yet that same level of legal regulation doesn't apply to immediate relatives of government officials. We've seen frequently with spouses and children of congressmen, and now we're seeing it with the son of a cabinet member. Yes, this may technically be legal, but legal does not equate to just and desirable. This reads to me like a serious loophole in the law that needs to be closed.
Uh, essentially betting against a policy your former head put in place isn't a typical thing?
You would absolutely steer clear of this. There's plenty of other things they could be doing, no?
Just to make the point. This is such a typical thing investment banks do, that (especially) they are the ones doing it and nobody else?
(and/or have an explicit approval workflow that effectively does the above).
It was damaging.
In 2015.
And then for a bit between 2021 and 2024.
Now it's not again.
You have to enforce these sorts of gentlemen's agreements. Just saying "it's damaging" isn't enough to actually make it damaging.
But the supreme court is a separate branch of government from the executive, so the analogy doesn't really hold. To claim otherwise would require Lutnick playing some 4d chess where he's publicly pro tariffs, but secretly anti-tariffs and was sandbagging the government's legal defense (can he even do that?), all the while not tipping Trump or the MAGA base off for being disloyal.
One might argue it should fall under a different technical label, but whatever label one uses (A) it stinks of corruption and (B) it's only the tip of the iceberg.
People entrusted with government authority to do work for the public shouldn't be personally profiting from how they decide to wield that authority. Imagine a policeman that arrests people while placing bets about how long that person will be jailed, what they'll be charged with, or whether they'll be convicted.
The objection that "it's unfair, they know something other bettors don't" occurs first not because it's the biggest issue, but because it's easier to prove.
The bigger problem is making improper decisions with their work-powers in order to personally profit, a trust and separation which they've already destroyed by placing the bets in the first place.
Did they know it was illegal? Any more than say, the Biden administration "knew" that forgiving student loans were illegal?
it doesnt have to be black and white. they knew enough to spin up a business that when it is overturned they could make money... which means they knew the probability was high.
Lutnick deal: we pay you $X' now, and if Y' happens, we collect everything which will substantively exceed $X'.
This is not insurance, its closer to shorting stocks.
Oh, one other thing: the insurance company has essentially nothing to do with Y at all, in the sense that they have no control over Y and generally speaking no involvement in it (think: accidents, floods, storms, fires). By contrast Lutnick is the Secretary of Commerce of the United States of America.
* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.
This is easy to say in hindsight. There was a non-zero chance the decision could have went the other way. Also, companies aren't stupid. They don't buy insurance against things that are impossible.
And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.
Companies don't want to deal with the headache for many things. It's not a given over what time horizon and how much work is involved to get the refund. It's totally sensible to sell the claim for 70 cents on the dollar for example.
The supreme court absolutely hears cases that are obvious. They do it for several reasons - to create clarity, to narrow scope, to set a very clear precedent, and other reasons.
This was a case that split both the liberal and conservative blocs. Obama’s former SG, Neal Katyal, went up there and argued for limiting presidential power over the economy. One of the justices quipped about the irony of Katyal’s major contribution to jurisprudence being revitalization of non-delegation doctrine, which has always been a conservative focus.
If it were close, I think he would have voted the other way. The folks on the court appear extremely inclined to take the other side on things just as a mental exercise, or to be able to write something on the record that they find interesting.
It was close to zero.
Thomas joined fully with Kavanaugh’s dissent. He wrote separately to articulate his view of the scope of non-delegation doctrine. He pointed out tariffs and taxes are different, in that tariffs implicate international relations, which is primarily within the province of the president. His analysis is extremely cogent. I was actually talking with my wife (we’re both Fed Soc people) that the administration should have pushed that angle much harder in the argument.
Did you read the Federal Circuit en banc decision? You don’t get two Obama appointees to vote in favor of the Trump’s administrations unprecedented tariffs when the legal issue “isn’t close.”
And, surely you understand that many see using the due process clause to make his argument was a stretch. Just saying "his analysis is extremely cogent" doesn't make it so.
I don’t know enough about the ethics laws to know if it was strictly illegal, but it does create a smell.
Suppose a county engineer has influence on whether oil drilling will be allowed (they don’t make policy but consult those who do), and prior to approval their relatives buy up a lot of land in the area. That engineer may not have been the deciding factor, but it seems like it runs afoul of ethics laws/standards.
Also, the SCOTUS is not a criminal court, it is a constitutional court. If a case is heard there, both sides have not agreed on "obvious illegality". That is unsuprising since in general one side (in this case, the administrative branch of the US Government) is being accused of illegal behavior - when it comes to constitutional rather than criminal questions, most parties do not just accept their guilt, but push as far as they can towards exoneration.
Frequently, however to everybody else, the case concerns obvious illegality.
In insurance, you pay [-$10] to avoid a potencial negative risk [-$100].
Here you get money [+$10] instead of waiting for a potencial positive benefit [+$100].
Very slightly related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mortgage
There is an argument in about two months' time as to whether or not the Birthright Citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment actually guarantees birthright citizenship in the US. There is no serious legal argument in favor of the interpretation being advanced by the Trump administration, that it does not. And yet here we are.
The deal stinks because Cantor bet against the administration that its former head is a part of, and against the signature policy of the president its former head serves.
Just because something isn't obvious to you, it doesn't mean it wasn't obvious to a lot of people.
In this case X was the tariffs. You are out of your depth.
If this was so obvious, wouldn't there have been more competitors pushing down the value of it?
Is there any proof he didn't have insider information? With this administration + court, it's rare when some sort of fraud, bribes, or protection money payments aren't at play.
If a fraction of the level of skepticism these people applied to Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton were applied to Trump and his cronies, they'd be demanding impeachment.
But members of the government being able to trade on matters of government policy is exactly how government corruption works. Previous administrations understood this was important to prevent (Carter putting his peanut farm in a blind trust, the Bush's did the same) but now Trump has made clear corruption is just totally fine (why else become president or a government official).
Even if they hadn't made that bet were consumers going to get anything? The refunds would go to whoever directly paid the tariffs, which will generally be businesses.
I doubt that many businesses will go the effort of figuring out how much of any price increases they did while those tariffs were in effect raised the price for each individual customer, and issue refunds for that amount.
"Amid online claims Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, senior executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, could benefit from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, a firm spokesperson told Newsweek it has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.""
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...
SCOTUS largely functions as a post-facto legitimization machine for those that appoint them. They do not interpret the constitution so much as serve as god-people in funny costumes that provide the cultural message from god that the actions of their political persuasion were legal (or illegal) even in cases where a historical and literal reading of the constitution would otherwise find you with no way to find them legitimate if not for man in black robe say so.
------ re: "2 of 3" below due to throttling--------
A vote to refund here was not a vote against the admin, it was a vote to simplify the laundering of the tax. It was a vote to put the money straight into the coffers of admin insiders like Lutnick et al financial engineering scheme. Meanhwile it did not invalidate tariffs, as Trump immediately pivoted to a different tariff structure.
As a second note, the profit here was actually not dependent nearly as much on the vote as the insider information. The fact the best any rebuttal can come up with is the vote might have been 'wrong' is basically totally defaulting to the insider trading element which means you are totally yielding the underlying premise.
That is, the only 'vote' against the admin in this case would be one that went against their insider information. Failure to note this is how the justices and admin have swindled you and the public. The very posing of this comment of rayiner et al reveals how they tricked you.
They were nominated in Trump's first term, which had a very qualitatively different cabinet assembled around Trump, one much less focused on sycophancy and pleasing Trump. I don't think anybody in Trump's cabinet 6 years ago was thinking about the potential powers a president had in being able to change tariffs based on how he felt waking up in the morning, much less interrogation of judicial candidates based on how willing they were to go along with that.
You can blame RBG for one of those. It fascinates me that Biden made the same mistake RBG did, I’ll always wonder how different the would would be if she had stepped down and the democratic party had held a real primary.
I don’t like trump, I think he stinks. The democratic party has a few own-goals in this current game.
It's unfortunate how it went, but I respect her decision.
You guys should have nominated Amy Klobuchar as VP so you had a credible backup when it became apparent that Biden was too old to run again. That’s a mistake that’s going to continue holding you back, since Biden made South Carolina the first primary state: https://www.masslive.com/politics/2025/06/2028-dem-frontrunn....
As Obama said, “never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”
Ofcourse most American politicians are pathetic losers who immediately cave but judges are generally people who are used to dealing with thugs.
And if you ever wondered why judges cannot be fired by the Executive branch now you know.
Given that the 2/3 justices appointed by Trump voted against the tariffs, what's the implication here? That Trump deliberately picked anti-tariff justices just so he can engage in a rube goldberg plan to enact tariffs, buy tariff refunds on the cheap, and then have them revoked?
Any vote towards what the insider information pointed to was a vote 'for' the admin as they had financially engineered their winnings based on that. And meanwhile Trump immediately turned to a new tariff structure. The vote they gave was the strongest vote in favor of the admin insiders they could have given, and meanwhile didn't actually stop Trump from continuing on with the scheme.
Following that logic, it make sense that those 3 voted with the administration.
Oh wait...
The key is whether they had insider information given their association with these justices.
You keep changing what you are saying.
(2) Is that SCOTUS functions as a legitimization process
(3) Is that de-legitimizing this particular tariff regime, while trump immediately pivots to a new tariff, is a best case scenario for the admin insiders as it lets them profit immensely from refund corruption while still pivoting immediately to a new tariff. The vote was one in favor of the Trump insiders.
(4) It is hilarious that the best counter your argument et al includes is just glossing over the insider aspect, which means you're just yielding the entire underpinning to this thread to me, which is more than enough to satisfy the premise on its own even if you reject this particular vote as being in the service of the admin insiders.
Of course, if you just smugly quote half of what I said and keep ping ponging one side or the other when I study the other half, citing muh changed argument, then you can play this fraudulent argument that pretends I "changed" what I said. This reveals your argument as a deliberate fraud so I will leave you the last word to lie further to the ether, rest assured I will not read whatever non-sense follows.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...
There’s no secret sauce here - their guess as to how the case is going is as good as any outside observer, and based on the questions made by the justices.
This was a very complex decision that ideologically divided the courts.
Because I think not. And I feel pretty strongly about this. The conflict of interest is so glaringly obvious that it should be completely self-evident why every voter should want to prevent, ban and punish any such action.
I feel that anyone involved in this tariff insurance business should be able to prove without a shadow of doubt that they had no political insider knowledge about the whole thing, and I'm extremely skeptical that this is the case (just from the pople involved alone!).
“ House kills effort to release all congressional sexual misconduct and harassment reports”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-kills-effort...
What partially non-public information did he have? Be specific.
How would I know? I'm neither Lutnick nor his son.
My point is that there is an extremely obvious conflict of interest here. If your family business is directly affected by decisions and information of the public office that you hold, then the very obvious risk is that you are going favor official decisions that help your business (possibly to the detriment of the majority), and that you leverage non-public information for personal gain.
For this specific case, insider knowledge could be a precise understanding on the "shakiness" of the initial tariffs combined with an insider picture of ongoing legal cases against them (progress and expected success rate).
I'm not saying that Lutnick & sons comitted some kind of crime, but if you let your family business overlap with your public office this much, then the resulting scrutiny is more than justified, and you could make a strong point that such a situation should be avoided in the first place.
Probably just a good guess. At least it wasn't based on intimate knowledge of things based on being in a position extremely close to everyone involved in all of it. Sheesh.
The admin is just here to literally steal tax dollars.
> Now if this isn't insider trading (by the literal Commerce Secretary), I don't know what is.
That'd neatly address this particular instance of insider trading, and probably many other similar schemes that didn't make it into the press.
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/howard-lutnick-criticis...
https://businessplus.ie/news/howard-lutnick-donald-trumps-tr...
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/01/30/how-a...
When was the last time this wasn't the case? Back in the 1960's maybe? I started following politics around the time I started college - 1993 - and this has been true in my entire "following politics" part of life
Obviously if a company did this, refunding consumers was the last thing on their mind.
What consumers will presumably never be refunded for are the increased prices they've been paying for imports of any kind (from Walmart, Amazon, grocery store) where someone else was the importer.
As for whether consumers should get anything, I’m sympathetic. It’s a matter of implementation though. How would you refund so many people? You’d have to quantify how much overhead they’ve paid in tariffs, and that seems like an IRS-scale job. Dealing with it at the scale of individual companies is at least tractable.
If you think this is smart then you may as well go around clubbing old ladies over their heads, as long as you don't get caught it's like free money right?
The alternative is not to forbid companies from selling those rights, the alternative is to undo this deal and pay the whole amount back to those that originally forked it over and who needed to sell these 'rights' in order to keep their companies alive.
Yes, I know this isn't the first time this has happened, and that people likewise benefit from connections to governments led by other political parties. Those instances are also bad!
Yes, because tariffs, like all taxes in the USA, are not imposed on individual people or entities. They’re on industries and specific materials.
If a company truly thought the chance of winning was low and needed the money now, they would pick the best offer. Regardless of who is making it.
Where's the extortion? The "it's a nice shop you got there..." racket only works if you can strongly influence whether the damages occur (ie. you tell your goons to attack the shop, or not). So far as I can tell however, that's not the case, because Trump wanted the tariffs to stay, and was sad that they got revoked. Going back to the mob analogy, it would be like if the mob boss asked for protection money, the goons didn't damage the shop, the mob boss was sad that the shop didn't get damaged, and then went to to find some other way to damage the shop (ie. section 122 tariffs).
For example, NCR (National Cash Register) used to have their sales people "accidentally" break competitive machines (dropping them on the floor was common -- these were old precision mechanical adders), then offer an NCR machine as a "free" replacement.
You could argue this wasn't extortion. What are the damages? The replacement machine was higher value, so the shop was "made whole", and was only temporarily without a cash register. Of course, the competitor got screwed out of support contracts + renewal, and it was made very clear to the stores they had to play ball. (Unless they wanted to buy a replacement, and watch it also get smashed.)
It's the same with the tariffs:
Adopt a bunch of Trump dictated policies, or they steal your money (the mechanism is not providing exemptions). Later, they "refund" the payments (so, no further court action), but somehow the money does not go back to the people that it came from.
Ignoring the businesses that sold their rights to collect, all sorts of prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The consumers that are paying the increased amounts at retail are not going to see a cent of this settlement. Where is my check?
Also, it's unclear how many Supreme Court justices changed their votes because of the sold rights to collect refunds. The company involved gave a lot of money to Trump and conservative campaigns, and many of the justices are in his pocket. It's also unclear if they bribed the justices directly, since that's not public data.
On top of that, when these "securities" were sold, it could have been made clear that they would come with favoritism in the future. Did businesses that paid up get special exemptions? Were they threatened with intimidation that then didn't happen because they sold the rights?
All of the above is standard practice with this administration. They had the benefit of the doubt, but burned through it years ago.
Anyway, you want figures, well, here are some figures:
https://marketrealist.com/why-did-700-bu/
I'm sure there are other sources, better ones, worse ones but they all tell roughly the same story: willy nilly tarrifs have a negative effect on one's ability to operate a business. Businesses like predictable, stable climates to operate in.
It takes a fair amount of money to take a court case to the Supreme Court. You can pay it all (and still maybe lose), or you can let the law firm have part of what you win. This happens all the time in the US legal system. It's not extortion; it's essentially venture funding by the law firm. (Yes, I'm aware of the pattern in the previous sentence, but I'm in fact a human, and not even LLM-assisted.) If the company doesn't want to play that way, they don't have to. They can pay the full cost of the lawsuit themselves.
https://thehedgefundjournal.com/the-emerging-market-for-liti...
Don't sell your right to your tariff refund is one of those things that sounds good in principle, but falls apart when you apply some sense to it.
No? You also do it for certainly. "One bird in hand beats two in the bush" and all that. You see this occurring outside of tariff refunds, with businesses selling debts to debt collectors for pennies on the dollar, or bond holders selling high risk bonds (eg. Argentina) for steep discounts.
I'm sure there are a few exceptional cases, but that doesn't seem to me like it would be the typical cases. A company needing to pay $100 in tariffs but then the $20 of cash infusion being the thing that saves the day seems rather unlikely.
I'd say it's more likely this was a profit center to more companies than it was a life line. As in they passed the tariff down to their consumers, and also collected the 20% as a cash payment to juice the bottom line.
More common though would be simply a way to help defray some costs and provide certainty.
Or would you trust someone on advising you, that has a pretty huge financial interest in proposing you policies that will fail because they are illegal?
So I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Why not replace the I.R.S. with an External Revenue Service, which will collect tariffs and other levies from foreign sources instead of taxing citizens?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/donald-trumps-...
Definitely smart, but also sure looks like an insider play / corruption / self-dealing.
I mean, look, there's plenty of conflicts of interest, and stuff that sure looks like graft, and claims of people making insane amounts of money off of stuff. But in this case, the commerce secretary's options were 1) do the tariffs or 2) get fired. Minion? Sure. Minion without the self-respect or ethics to quit when they were being told to do unconstitutional stuff? Also sure. Pushing these policies, as though they had agency in the matter? No.
The fact that businesses were put in a position to make this choice is outrageous in the first place.
This was the point of the tariffs, wasn't it? The White House now has a $130B slush fund to distribute more or less however they want, with no accountability because accountability is by-design impossible. Sure maybe half of it will go where it ought to as a fig leaf, but a very large chunk of that cash will be making its way to Trump's loyalty crew.
The government knows exactly who paid what in duties, otherwise they couldn't tell if you were trying to avoid duties.
So they know exactly who to pay back and how much.
No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties. There's going to be a whole lot of Trump toadies & business owners in the chain, siphoning cash from refunds before they work their way back to the people who actually paid them. And that's not even getting into the open corruption & fraud that will be happening as part of this as well.
The entity that handed over the money to the government is the entity that paid the duties, and is the one the government must refund.
If an entity has passed those costs on does not change that, and does not turn the 130B into a slush fund.
However I agree that consumers will be likely be royally screwed by this debacle, that much was obvious from the start.
In reality, half of the funds will go to that. Maybe even some tiny portion of it will genuinely make its way back to the people who actually paid the duties. This is the fig leaf to which I referred. The other half will go to Trump toadies in the form of "mistakes," fraud, corruption, skimming, unclaimed funds, etc. This is the slush fund to which I referred.
In the end, all of it is going to Trump toadies. It's a $130B transfer of wealth to Trump's financial backers.
You agreed with your supplier on a price. You paid it.
Doesn’t matter that part of the price was tariffs or component costs or labor. Doesn’t matter if your supplier gets a tax rebate or a kickback from an upstream supplier after the fact. These things are entirely immaterial to the meeting of the minds when you execute the contract for sale.
The only moderately fuzzy case is going to be if there is an outright line item for “tariff charge” - I always thought companies were being a bit reckless explicitly adding these as line items due to this exact uncertainty. Very few companies are going to have a perfect 1:1 ratio here so there is some definite business risk in doing so.
And no, not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies” - that’s an absurd claim on its face. The ones I know hurt the most and nearly put out of business due to needing to raise prices certainly were not. And there is zero way they could afford refunding at a 1:1 ratio now.
It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax, not the middleman who ferried it from here to there. The unclear method for how to accomplish this is where the grift will be coming in.
> not even close to all companies that were charged tariffs are “trump toadies”
I did not claim this. I claimed most of the money that will be refunded will go to Trump toadies.
That would require most of the money collected being from trump toadies to begin with. Anyone that regularly imports goods as a matter of business will also be requesting their refunds. Only a tiny fraction sold their rights.
> It does matter if the tax that was gathered was illegal, as it is here. The illegally gathered funds should go back to the entity that paid the tax.
The entity that paid the tax was the one that wrote the check to the federal government. They chose to (or not) pass all or a portion of those costs down to their customer. The customer in the end chose to purchase the goods or not.
If your landlord charges you $100/mo more in rent due to a property tax that was later reassessed due to a mistake, they are under no legal obligation to refund you that money. You chose to rent at the higher price.
Simply put: Your recourse was at the time of transaction. After that it’s no longer your money. Plenty of companies get refunded errant taxes paid years later due to law being misapplied or even found outright illegal. This is no different.
The only marginally interesting legal question here is going to be the companies that separated it out as a line item. I imagine this will be roughly as enforceable as “fuel surcharges” are on airline tickets - where the surcharge has nothing to do with the actual real time cost of Jet fuel. It will likely devolve all the way down to specific clauses in contracts, most of which will not cover this to start with. So it may as well be a “I’m wearing black socks today” tax as a line item would be my guess. Very interested in the first few test cases though!
These illegal taxes weren't only on optional goods. I couldn't opt out of buying everything for a full year. I disagree that it's OK for the government to force everyone in the country to give a $130B gift to business owners via an illegal action, the vast majority of which will be going straight to the wealthiest companies & people, and/or Trump's personal supporters. It's just straight-up theft.
Show up with a banana peel at a grocery, and say you want a tariff refund for the banana you paid cash for, 6 months ago?
There's no tracking for almost all of tariff affected purchases.
And while this specific tariff situation is silly, and annoying, it's been going on forever. There were cases of tariffs on lumber from Canada, with presidents of all stripes. Some were fought, won in court, and nary a person questioned "where is the refund for the consumer".
> I don't see how he had a better view of the whole thing than anyone else.
Given the above, you really don't think Lutnick had a "better view" of the likely outcomes and timelines, including the Trump admin's planned and gamed out responses to certain outcomes, than the average Joe on the street? I think that's extremely, uh, naive.
It's obscene. I don't care whether a law was broken or not.
You want to profit from government incompetence? Stop being part of the government then.
This is just hollow populist anti-elite rhetoric. Who do you think sold them the tariff refunds? They're not buying them from granny who didn't know any better. They bought it from other executives who knew, or at least ought to know what was at stake.
Everyone wins except granny.
To be fair, I think some companies didn't raise prices because they thought they would be overturned.
It's not insider trading that they acted on that consensus.
I'm saying the public tide shifted and the legal reality set in that they weren't going to get sympathetic rulings...which they don't care about anyway since it's not their money and the tariff threats already had any desired effects sought.
POTUS was floated the idea that they could enrich themselves, so the decision was made, communicated to the Secretary of Commerce and to the SCOTUS judges.
> And corporations were willing to risk a hundred of billions in tariffs fees on the odds it might get refunded just because some finance company might get a small cut of refunds?
Nothing to do with them. Narcissists don't worry about the future of others, except as a narrative to sell their personal ambitions.
Some people don't believe the administration is that flippant. I think it's obvious they are having fun.
They could have just been smarter than average and found an angle others didn’t see that paid off for them.
This would have been the case no mattern what.
I don't buy into the conspiracies, but it is quite odd how he always manages to come up on top.
https://www.reddit.com/r/911archive/comments/1r5rkk3/howard_...
“Trump’s buddy’s son offers 20c/$” does not seem like a terrible deal for getting your money out.
Turns out most (if not all) of it went to the senior executive team, wtih himself being the primary beneficiary [2].
This is also the same Howard Lutnick who the DoJ accidentally released a photo of with Jeffrey Epstein [3]. People noticed and they removed it. People noticed that too so they restored it.
Just so we're all clear who Howard Lutnick is.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/busine.ss/judge-approves-ame...
[2]: https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2022877480516813077
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/27/howard-lutni...
But it’s not “insider trading.” They didn’t have insider information on how the courts were going to rule—especially where it was a 6-3 split with three conservatives siding against the administration. And a split in the appellate court as well, with two republican and two democrat appointees siding for the administration.
And Cantor had nothing to do with imposing these tariffs in the first place. Trump loves tariffs. He has been wanting to do these tariffs since the 1980s. He imposed tariffs in his first term and campaigned on imposing them now.
So you’re taking a story about Cantor Fitzgerald displaying disloyalty to Trump and trying to turn it into a “corruption” story that makes no sense.
So - with umpteen $billion on the line, and all the big-shot lobbyists and Washington insiders and experts that all those huge companies had on payroll to advise them - they decided to sell at 20 cents on the dollar.
Theory: When the far-smarter-than-us money bets big, they might know the actual odds.
...assuming they held those rights on their books, rather than selling it off to other hedge funds.
In a just world, someone like that would be jailed indefinitely and made to publicly take stand about his activities, and called out to his face during depositions about his lies.
I want everyone who associated with Epstein to be under oath at some point, and I think we should prioritize based on how many pieces of evidence their name appears on.
You think Trump will ever let himself be questioned under oath? Any rational person knows that his refusal is tantamount to an admission, but I bet he does not see it that way.
Problem is Willie knows everything (he was the president for fuck's sake) and is just lawyer-speaking his way out of admitting that he along with multiple former presidents (including the current one) were/are compromised by a hostile nuclear-armed foreign actor's (read: "ally's") intelligence agency. He can't sing, or the whole charade comes apart.
The contagion fallout is massive. This involves several of the wealthiest people on the planet, tech leaders, business leaders, politicians in powerful countries...and involves several major geopolitical actors...and involves some unspeakably disgusting actions to children.
Lutnick is a particularly corrupt individual though. He’s in the Epstein files like Trump and Musk and Thiel. But he also took over Cantor by suing the widow of Cantor after his death. And now he hands the company to children and has no shame about openly nepotistical decisions like this.
Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?
$7T of spending, $1.77T in deficit[1] and they planned to fix this hole with $100B?!
Masterminds!
…and now they need to refund it.
NB: also puts into perspective how numb I became about reading AI and AI related sums of money, and how crazy actually those numbers are.
[0] off course many knew that it’s crazy way before it happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_bud...
Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.
You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.
Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.
Even if the tariffs are not a lot, they are potent negotiating leverage.
They def knew they were lying about much they were collecting
They def knew they were lying about who is paying
They lied to the public about that and got a bit of extra creme in the bag but the effect was mostly leverage, which 'kind of worked'.
They could have very effectively used illegal tariffs to actually do 90-deals-in-90 days, knowing the case would take time to draw out.
But - they have no plan.
Trump does not think 9 months ahead - he has grudges, grievances, and he pursues whatever grievance he wants to that day.
He doesn't forget and will push his staff to go against old enemies
The point is not to improve the economy, bring back jobs - the point is to 'Look Tough' and 'Stick it to the Libs and Foreigners' and to get elected again, failing that, rig the elections (note, his secret signed Executive order with all sorts of things regarding elections)
The 'high visibility' of ICE is not a bad thing for him - it very much in purpose to show MAGA base that he's cracking liberal, immigrant and brown people heads.
Jamming those Somalis on the concrete is exactly the optics he wants for his base.
It was only until people started dying when newsmax/fox started questioning the legitimacy and some support is lost - and not even that much among the base.
Same thing with tariffs: he will play grievance, the 'Liberal Courts' are against, him blah blah and MAGA will be fine with it.
The problem is that Core MAGA is maybe really only 20% and Soft MAGA another 15% and that's not enough to win.
But it's almost.
Narrative, performance, grievance, populism, social media, information sphere - that's it.
It's Post-Truth.
People keep talking about these through the lens of the 'issues', it's completely wrong headed - policies don't matter, only perception etc.
Reality does have a way of sneaking through though, and 'hardball reality' can change minds. People do understand Epstein, tariffs when they pay attention, unemployment, prices, 'war mostly bad' etc. etc..
This is White House Reality TV, not really policy and that's the best way to understand it.
The entire Cabinet have completely been unable to explain the tariff policy - they keep changing their views there is no consistency - it's the same with the war in Iran - everyone's saying different things, objectives are unclear.
It's irrational too think that there is 'policy' here, this is whim, impulse, populism.
I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.
Capitalism is about efficiency, and eventually there are going countries where producing certain items will always be more efficient. East asian countries have spent decades innovating and investing in their manufacturing capabilities.
Also, one thing that grinds my nerves are the narratives of trade balances that only focus on physical goods but conveniently ignore services.
US exports trillions in software, ai, music, videogames, financial services, cloud, and that's conveniently ignored.
Eventually tariffs come back biting those who issue them, because the moment your local industries don't need to compete anymore to survive, they have no incentives to innovate.
It's paying more for something just to keep it domestically available for purposes of national security.
This is an interesting way to frame a tax on Americans, but it aligns with this administrations actions.
The DOGE refund cheque is of course, in the mail.
I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.
So, who do you count? everyone? only the informed? only people with strong views? Or do you assume people support the views and actions of the people they voted for?
The difference was that in the past US understood that you "rule" better when you surround yourself with enemies.
Now the policy is to dictate conditions left and right.
The new view seems to be based on a zero sum, transactional view of international affairs. In this mode every interaction must clearly benefit the US more than any other participant. We have to clearly "win" every time.
[1] and this is not even counting 2nd order "surplus" from things like no longer having to fight world wars.
Which is it? A number can't be small and large at the same time.
I mean, FFS--we have a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes and was elected anyway!
You'd have to be pretty gullible to think that raising taxes on imported goods won't result in price hikes at the checkout counter.
> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/trump-brags-oval-office-billionair...
Sounds a bit like Brexit.
Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.
The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.
When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?
The artificially reduced competition will spur buying domestic products, but can also make domestic producers complacent. They don’t develop new features because they have an almost captive audience, until foreign producers advance enough that people will pay the tariff premium for better foreign products.
Then it’s a catch-22. Domestic producers are behind on technology so killing the tariffs will bankrupt them, but raising the tariffs only leans into their complacency.
Now we the people probably don’t get our money back….
The don't forget about congress. 216 GOP congressional reps voted to handicap congress's ability to halt tariffs. For much of the current session of congress, their calendar wasn't counting days.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/house-republicans-block-con...
It's not really, this is the result of having a flawed democratic system.
What do Turkey, Philippines, Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Nicaragua, etc and now US have all in common?
They are ALL presidential or semi-presidential republics where a single person "rules" without needing to face opposition in a parliament nor even requiring support from its own party.
Winner-takes-all democracies, aren't democracies if only part of the electors is represented in the executive.
Presidential republics are super dangerous, they combine the perils of dictatorships with a cherry on the cake of being able to claim popular mandate.
Seriously, it's not a coincidence that the last parliamentary republic to turn into an authocracy has been Sri Lanka 50+ years ago.
Hah, we are 100% not getting our money back. And the higher, tariff level, prices aren't going to go back down either.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
What got my attention on this was this HN comment by rstuart4133:
"There are Non-Resident Importers, which are foreign companies that import goods into the USA, but do not have a presence in the United States. About 15% of USA imports come through NRIs. For them this reversal sets up a true irony. Trump effectively forced US citizens to pay more the imported goods. He thought that money would go to the USA treasury. Now the US treasury has to pay it back, so it is a free gift to the exporting countries. Like China. Truly delicious."
The importers pay the tariffs, and they might get a refund, but it's unlikely they can distribute the money back to the people who they passed the price increase onto.
Imagine I imported 1 ton of rice and paid the tariff. Then I split that ton of rice into 2000 one pound bags and sold them to two super markets, with a higher price accounting for the tariff. Then one super market decided to absorb the price from their margins and sell it at the same price as before to avoid price shocks. Can I track down the other 1000 purchasers who paid a higher price? Is it even worth it?
These are taxes that businesses have to pay and as a result, they pass on to the consumer.
Larger companies have some room (in some cases) to absorb some of these costs. While smaller companies do not. These can literally put people out of business overnight.
Here is a specific example: https://nypost.com/2025/04/08/us-news/idaho-business-owner-c...
Or Tax Foundation? https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs...
3/9/25 - 45 items - $178.98
3/15/25 - 40 items - $187.13
3/22/25 - 59 items - $315.29
3/29/25 - 45 items - $131.36
...
2/14/25 - 48 items - $238.15
2/21/25 - 17 items - $117.49 (used $45 in coupons from store loyalty points, actual cost $162.49)
2/28/25 - 27 items - $165.27
My grocery bill definitely is feeling it, now is it 100% tariffs, probably not. But research points to it being some what related to tariffs [1,2,3] You'll notice in the most recent shops, I have been trying to skip the non-essentials when possible to keep my bill lower.
I don't have any other regular purchases with history to look back on. It's not like I replace all my consumer electronics every 6 months-1 year. Closest thing that I have to consistent historical data is 3D printer filament, which has gone from $15.99 to $16.99 on Amazon for my brand of choice from April 2025 to my most recent order last week.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/blog/trump-tariffs-food-prices/
[2] https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-june-17...
[3] https://www.edelmanfinancialengines.com/education/life-event...
Don't hold your breath for either to be given back.
Congress has been gradually handing their power over to the executive for decades. For decades, people have been warning that this was setting up for major abuse if you got a particularly bad president. Well, guess what....
And now they get it all back! If they can figure out the paperwork. Which I expect most will, because if you import things and pay tariffs, you have to be good at govt paperwork.
Wow. I don’t know what this means. But it’s a huge windfall to a very specific horizontal slice of the economy - cutting across industries and supply chains. Just whoever happened to be doing the importing gets a giant present. So bizarre. Economists will write about this case study for decades.
Can we have small watchdog programs that deeply study market conditions for critical resources (like peanut butter/eggs/milk/bread/etc.) and produce detailed data on why prices are what they are and what they estimate prices should be? It would be fascinating to see like detailed breakdowns and raw profit margins on different goods instantly.
Edit: Sorry autocorrect thought I said moronically,
Most things are never going to be cheaper than they are today. Some things may be cheaper this time next year but not by more than a few percent at the most.
The Chipotle earnings calls were pretty much the prime example of this. CEO more or less expressing amazement at how elastic consumers were on pricing, and that due to the increases not impacting sales volume they planned to continue ramping until it did.
I think plenty of companies were operating off the idea that price competition was far more important than it turned out to be. I note the baskets of those shopping next to me in the grocery store and this rings true. Due to a myriad of reasons - consumer behavior being a large one of those - buying behavior based on price just isn’t as much of a thing as it was 30 years ago. Almost no one is shopping multiple supermarkets, buying cheaper alternatives, buying in-season veggies and fruit when it’s cheap, waiting for sales to stock up, buying in bulk and freezing, using coupons, meal planning based on the latest supermarket Sunday circular, etc. only a tiny minority of people have been doing so.
Couple that learned helplessness with the monopoly situation for many (most?) markets in the US and it’s no surprise to me that once the dam broke there is no going back. The price discovery moving forward is going to be much more aggressive. It will take a generation or three to get back to thrifty consumer behavior unless we see something actually painful to the average person on a scale of the Great Depression.
That is because the extra money in the economy also inflated salaries. Inflation is annoying but it basically has no impact on affordability over the long run. Everyone just assumed that their increases in salary were a well earned recognition of their contributions, but the increases in prices was pure corporate greed and corruption. They were both the same thing. People got more money and prices went up.
Oh, so it was always only about a money transfer from the customers (who fully and wholly bore the cost otlf the tariffs already) to the companies which will now get the refunds for what their customers already covered?
What a robbery.
> except profits would be down and shareholders would be angry.
Right. So when profits turn into losses, you expect shareholders to be OK with the stock price falling to zero and they lose their entire investment? You think this is "fine"?
I'm not defending that. Just explaining.
I (unknowingly) ordered something on Etsy from another country. UPS delivered the items, then sent me a letter requiring I pay the tariff and an extra tariff handling fee. UPS paid the government, so UPS should get their money back from the government, then refund me. I'm not holding my breath.
> ‘Corporate and industry group political action committees have donated more than $44 million directly to the campaigns and leadership PACs of the 147 members of the Sedition Caucus. Companies and trade associations that pledged to suspend donations have given more than $12 million to the campaign and leadership PACs of the Sedition Caucus.
> Koch Industries ($626,500), American Crystal Sugar ($530,000), Home Depot ($525,000), Boeing ($488,000), and UPS ($479,500) have contributed the most money to members of the Sedition Caucus through their corporate PACs.’
> Tomé’s reconciliation with representatives who legitimized Trump’s attempted presidential coup — and who may control Congress after the November midterm elections — shouldn’t surprise us. Trump lavished huge gifts on UPS and Corporate America that have made them richer.”
> The second Trump presidency has the potential to be even more lucrative for UPS, given that the bulk of UPS’s unionized workers are Teamsters and led by prominent Trump ally Sean O’Brien
https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/big-brown-and-the-fascists...
Looks like they've given a pretty similar amount to both parties[1]. UPS charging a specific "Tariff Fee" is bound to have angered Trump.
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/united-parcel-service/summa...
Blaming SCOTUS here is not out of the question, but they should not be "entirely" to blame, unless you think it's totally fine to run the Executive branch like you're trying to get away with something. It's not.
They also chose to appoint the conservative majority on the Supreme Court which made these choices.
[0] https://fivepoints.mattglassman.net/p/the-court-ieepa-and-th...
There were multiple court cases and this practice was found unlawful (and actually against EU law). But the government did not issue automatic refunds, and instead requested that people "actively appeal" with some time limits. They also refused to pay interest on the money withheld.
AFAIK, only about 50M Euro was paid back. A lot of funds gathered between 2002–2005 was never returned.
I've been living in Finland for 10+ years, and this whole story was super surprising for me to learn because the prevailing notion among people here is that Finland is the land of law, and everything is done correctly and legally, always, and we can and should trust the authorities.
There was no VAT payable on the car tax of imported cars, only the ELV (ei-arvonlisävero, literally "not value added tax").
The ELV idea was that for locally bought new cars you did have to pay VAT on car tax, but for used EU imports that was not legally possible (cannot charge VAT again when importing used item from another EU country), so an equivalent non-VAT tax was invented so the full tax (inc. VAT/ELV) stays the same.
But this was unfair for e.g. the reason that Finnish companies buying cars could deduct Finnish car tax VAT on local new cars on their VAT return but not the car tax ELV on imported used cars (since it was not VAT).
> we can and should trust the authorities.
Well, Finland has a fairly competent government usually for the most part. That mantra will not work in many other countries though - such as Germany. Just look at what Merz is doing; his left hand does not know what the right hand should do ...
No organisations or regime has ever considered itself illegitimate. The big guys consider smaller guys legitimate or illegitimate, but its just ink on a page.
Finland (and _ALL_ other countries) is an illegitimate regime, collecting its protection money, telling you to pray it does not alter the deal any further
For anyone who was still under the illusion that the tariffs would make any impact on the government debt, hopefully this illustrates that both the tariffs and the ridiculous DOGE effort were never really about the budget.
You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons. Whatever your desired outcome is, none of it matters until this gets to the Supreme Court. Given the nature of money, it doesn't even matter if some higher court refuses to give an injunction against the refunds being issued until after the appeal is considered and some set of refunds goes all the way through... no company that gets any money from a pre-SC refund can really use it until the entire matter is resolved at the SC level.
> You may see other judges rule that the refunds don't have to be paid, for any of several reasons.
I think the government might have a bit of an uphill battle given arguments they have previously made to courts. For example, consider this decision from the US Court of International Trade from 2025-12 [0]:
> However, as the Government notes in its response to Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction here, it “[has] made very clear—both in this case and in related cases—that [it] will not object to the [c]ourt ordering reliquidation of plaintiffs’ entries subject to the challenged IEEPA duties if such duties are found to be unlawful.”
> <snip>
> Judicial estoppel would prevent the Government from taking an inconsistent approach after a final result in V.O.S. [] The Government has emphasized this point itself, citing to Sumecht NA, Inc. v. United States, which holds that “the Government would be judicially estopped from taking a contrary position” regarding a prior representation involving the availability of relief in the form of reliquidation. [] Having convinced this court to accept that importers who paid IEEPA tariffs will be able to receive refunds after reliquidation, and having benefited from the court’s subsequent conclusion that importers will not experience irreparable harm as a consequence of liquidation, the Government cannot later “assume a contrary position” to argue that refunds are not available after liquidation.
> <snip>
> Additionally, the panel in In re Section 301 Cases unanimously agreed—as we do now—that the USCIT has “the explicit power to order reliquidation and refunds where the government has unlawfully exacted duties.” [] The Government acknowledges that “a decision [to the contrary] would be inconsistent with years of [the court’s] precedent.”
Obviously all this doesn't prevent the government from appealing anyways, but they'll need to get creative to get around their previous representations.
[0]: https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/25-154.pdf
That's what the GP likely meant.
The circus must go on.
Instead of ruling narrowly that named plaintiffs would get a refund
Eaton expressly said:
"all importers of record" which is all who were subject to the IEEPA duties.
It is unclear if this is lawful.
He didn't have to do this at all. He could stuck with tradition here. He specifies why he did it in this case, but this opens the door.
Also note that he did not open the door to "final liquidations" getting refunds (it is unclear how many tariffs more than 180 days ago were not officially protested).
Possibly a refund of about $500 per social security number. Doesn't even have to be in cash, could just directly go towards the social security fund if legislated that way.
Tons of ways to fix this quagmire in a way that's beneficial to people. But it won't happen.
Sarcasm aside, I agree the refunds should go back to consumers, not the importers. I don't have a source, but I have to imagine the lion's share of companies that were hit with tariffs increased their prices, and the consumer paid the bill.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
The number the New York Fed came up with is 90% was passed onto the consumer.
Looks like the hassle will now be on the backend...
Also contractually you didn't pay the duties so you wouldn't get refunds.
I'll never see that money.
Delayed refunds won't even start to repair the damage done by bankruptcies triggered by high tariffs, the snowballed cost of tariffs impacting multiple steps in the supply chain, the emotional toll on families and communities having to deal with less money and rising prices. But rehiring and getting some regions and communities back to work might be a step in the right direction.
EXCEPT WE NOW HAVE A 15% GLOBAL TARIFF ONGOING. And a lunatic administration that will fight tooth and nail for years to keep this going as long as possible.
Trump "loves" this country so much it hurts me.
or give it to shareholders.
Reinvesting it to generate more revenue now that prices are lower again is the obvious capitalist thing to do.
The companies aren't going to rehire workers out of charity. They do it because it makes them more money.
Why on Earth do you expect a single-time payment with no strings attached to make companies think some market is profitable so they should invest in it?
If our tariff structure went back to, say, October 2024, and companies who'd paid some inordinate tax - forcing layoffs and reductions - got a chunk of that back - and the taxes went back to what they were - there'd likely be some return to hiring and raises as before. But we can't get back to that any time soon with an administration hellbent on extracting as much from us via tariffs as possible.
And edit because I explained it badly:
That means that yes, getting the tariffs back can make them hire, because there may be more people wanting to buy things. Sending them the tariffs money will do absolutely nothing.
But even the first part isn't guaranteed, because you can't rollback the economy, things don't return to where they were, they go into some other place.
And now, less than 100 years later we're like "hey let's try that again!"
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-average-u-s-tariff-rate...
I definitely agree on principle, it sounds pretty tricky to see how proving "I paid $x more for groceries because of tarrifs" would work in practice.
Does anyone know of policy suggestions for how that could work?
* Direct Cash (using some equation for impoverished households)
* Infrastructure
* Better life conditions
No other uses for this money. The returns and the uses of this money must be public.
You’re getting mighty close to socialism there citizen.
As I understand it (which isn't a lot), if you paid a tariff on an overseas order you're theoretically due it back, although that might require taking the government to court, which is gonna cost more than the settlement for most people.
If companies want to try to refund customers and come up with their own formulas for that, that's great. But usually there isn't some objective right answer that can be imposed externally.
Read from that what you will... as a voter, or the POTUS.
It feels like a company should have to prove they didn't pass the tariff on to consumers in order to collect this.
The judge said the repayment process should be straightforward and grew impatient when a Justice Department lawyer said the government hadn’t yet formalized its position on refunding the tariffs, which President Trump imposed by citing a decades-old law. “Your position is clear,” the judge said. “The Supreme Court told you what your position is.”
Good time to specialize in "tariff litigation", if you're a law firm.
The big players can restructure supply chains. Small businesses can't. The mom and pops seem to suffer.
I'm hoping there can be an infusion of $ into those companies and maybe stimulate a little growth, or at least survival through the Trump years.
This is by design. No doubt the large corporations who kissed the ring and gave gold statues will be the first to receive this money.
What do you mean unclear? The ruling says that certain of the tariffs were always illegal.
I swear to God, the generation that voted the most for this stupid SoB will go down in history as the most stupid so far, like straight out of the Idiocracy.
Trillions of world wide economic damage, irreparable damage to transatlantic cooperation, death of post ww2 order. All because McFuckity Fuck saw online that brown man bad and there’s inexplicable feminist agenda, also somehow America needs to become great again because being top world economy is not good enough. Also soyjack memes.
lol
How would the government even be able to determine if a business increased product prices due to tariffs vs other factors, or even if the business increased prices at all? What if the product is a loss leader and the company was fine just eating the expense? Or what about a nefarious company who manufacturers their stuff in Canada but used "tariffs" as an excuse to increase prices? What would they be refunded from?
So if I'm the owner of Uncle Billy Bobs Autoparts and I ship from Madeupcountry. I billed you $500 extra for some new car part. The US government refunds me on the tariffs they charged me to import my product to you, and now your taxes is going into my refund. Who wins in this scenario? They're effectively giving every country a free bonus. I wouldn't be surprised if some people got scammed by the tariffs by being overcharged.
There's no serious paper trail to any of this to meaningfully return lost revenue to the American consumer, I would rather not waste tax dollars on refunds.
I guess the only "winners" are maybe businesses that didn't pass on the revenue loss on to the consumer? But how do you even correctly refund those businesses?
Gee, I don't know, receipts ?
Also simply revenue on the business end
One possibility would be for businesses to return the fraction of the tariff paid by customers to future customers by offering the items affected with a negative tax until the refund is used up.
Ha ha, that's a good one. I have yet to hear about reduced profits anywhere. Instead, as I said in another comment, I have actual physical receipts with the additional tariff cost (itemized!) in a pile on my workshop (which I'll never see refunded).
The invoices give you slam dunk evidence that you paid that amount in tariffs, and the supreme court decision says the payment was illegally collected, so seems like an easy win for you.
You could ask for a tariff refund from those suppliers.
It doesn't need to be a perfect solution, you could just give everyone a flat refund similar to class action payouts.
As someone who prices and sells labor and material for a living, nobody ate increased tariffs. They were passed along to the ultimate consumer of the tariffed product. Everyone was facing the same tariffs so they’re all incentivized to pass the cost along, line iteming the tariffs on the invoice would make it abundantly clear. I passed along all increased costs with a note on my proposal that said “Any and all additional tariffs will be paid for by the customer.”
I mean the importers were the ones who paid the duties. It's not a given they passed it on, and if it was then in many cases it was spread out. That is importer paid for one container of items, which in turn got sold to individuals which the government has no record of.
If you ordered delivery by say FedEx and they paid the duty and passed it on to you, you should have a reasonable case to get it refunded from FedEx when they get the money back. Ideally they handle it automatically since they have all the necessary details.
For manufacturing companies it's less clear, as some might have swallowed all or some of the duties, and multiple components might have been affected by different rates etc.
Will be interesting to see how companies who passed it on will handle this, given it's a massive PITA to do anything but screw over their customers.
I didn't have to deal with it, but from other comments, most of the international shippers also charged a hefty fee to broker the tarrifs. Expect not to get that refunded.
Actually, it is a given. Nobody ate tariffs, everyone passed them on.
That’s how capitalism works, you sum up the costs of production and add margin, unless you’re a VC backed company trying to take over a market by selling dollars for a quarter.
Nobody was trying to corner a market by eating tariffs and blowing their margins away, everyone passed them down to the ultimate consumer of the tariffed product. Take a look at the record profits that publicly traded companies are putting up, they’re the only ones that could potentially eat the tariffs and they obviously did not do so, which means smaller businesses definitely didn’t eat the tariffs either.
> and if it was then in many cases it was spread out
I can virtually guarantee that the final consumer of a tariffed product paid for the entire tariff. Like I said, nobody gains anything from absorbing tariffs. It’s bad business.
This was the plan from the get-go:
1. Illegal tariffs made
2. Companies pay tariffs
3. Companies sell goods with tariff passed on
4. tariffs deemed illegal
5. companies get refunds on tariffs
6. COMPANIES KEEP TARIFFS
7. The customers get fucked."Amid online claims Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons, Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, senior executives at Cantor Fitzgerald, could benefit from the Supreme Court’s tariff ruling, a firm spokesperson told Newsweek it has “never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs.""
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/howard-lutnick-sons-may-make-money-...
Trump doesn't care who went bankrupt or lost money, he was able to create a whole pile of red number buying opportunities for his friends in the know. And for himself.
It's now an age of oligarchy, stable corporate capitalism and gentlemanly bourgeois behaviour and the appearance of "rules based order" and equally brokered commerce is out, schoolyard bully attitude and "give me your lunch money" is in.
If you still want to profit, you make friends with the right people, kiss the ring, and get permission to become a highwayman or parasite like the rest of them.
At the bottom, is us. I don't think any election can put the cork back in this bottle. The only thing that will end this decline is an angry non-compliant populace that is sick of getting a very bad deal.
Clearly, this makes America great again. /s
There are mainly two reasons people buy something.
1) It is seen as good deal.
2) It is seen as luxury.
Your premise hinges on only #1 and ignores #2. #1 is also limited to select products. How many bed sheets or cars do you need?
It also rejects the Friedman doctrine [1]. The continual following of this doctrine is what has lead to the enshitification of many products and services. Non-living wages also came out of following it. Living wages harms profits.
Isn’t the new line that we’ve been at war with Iran for 47 years?
They've been pushing the national sales tax to replace income tax since the 2000s (and probably longer).
Whether or not these schemes would work is debatable, but to claim that they show an MO of regressive taxes is just false.
Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
My "smart play" wasn't on the merits of idea, largely the game theory aspect of moving forward to their policy goals after decades of having no traction. It's a unique idea, policy wise. Don't know if it will be effective. Neither do you.
Sadly I'm not. I'm objectively stating facts. This criminal cabal of spectacularly incompetent clowns is absolutely ransacking the final days of an empire. It is astonishing how Americans are unaware of this.
>Many governments, at least the ones that matter, are bankrupt. Quick google shows all G8 countries run a deficit.
The US ran a $2.3 trillion dollar deficit over the last 12 months, and spending has gone absolutely wild. At the same time it's handing out massive tax cuts to corporations, and has absolutely no path to get back on track. Quite the opposite, the Trump cabal is basically making it impossible to get back on track. Which is why they're looting everything they can as quickly as they can.
>Neither do you.
Yes, I know that it was harebrained and literally zero economists with a functioning brain have called it a "smart" play. Only absolute cultists or the most profoundly gullible ever found the arguments by the criminals convincing.
Further, as is classic with Trump's lies (that only spectacularly gullible and/or stupid people fall for), he sells every angle of the same play simultaneously. Not only will tariffs eliminate income tax -- a notion that is so mathematically stupid it is instantly dismissible -- simultaneously all of those jobs are going to be repatriated and there will be no imports. These two notions are absolutely at odds -- and both are just utter fantasy nonsense -- but stupid people believe what stupid people do.
And yeah, bro, tariffs are not a unique idea. There is no novelty here.
You guys are surrounded by other college-educated SWE, you have no idea how bad it is out there.
People without a college degree went Trump 56-43. People with a college degree went for Harris 56-42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
I guess there is no free lunch, each person who realizes the importance of education has to start taking it seriously right now and spend their lives getting their community to start taking it seriously and maybe hopefully the next generation can emerge much better off. We let this mess fester for decades and now we are paying for it for the rest of our lives because there is no free lunch.
Overcoming 'American Exceptionalism' to adopt a successful model like the Finnish education system would probably require a massive crisis. The current system will just limp along until then.
Finding the data on this would be convenient but its still unclear to me. I'm not a fan of how that article from NU cites its sources loosely, including lazily citing Wikipedia.
Maybe im misunderstanding you but I would think that any level of SWE skill would be a minimum amount of competence such that they wouldn't fall for Trumps tricks? SWE is rearranging bits accordance to logic...so you need to know logic no?
Vibe coding existed long before AI, especially in web/startup/enterprise information systems. You don't need to be a critical thinker to make a successful RoR app.
One made more promises to the poor and working class. It seems baked into your comment that the distribution should be 50-50 which seems crazy. A swing of ~5 points isn't that much.
This math would work on any demographic.
Onshoring manufacturing is something that has to be incentivized and that has positive externalities outside of dollars and cents.
But some tariffs were really dumb, like on bananas. We can't grow bananas here...
Don’t like the cost? It’s a negotiation tactic. Want manufacturing back? That’s what it’s doing actually, it’s definitely a longterm play to bring it back. Worried about the debt? The tariffs are going to be a huge, permanent revenue generator that gets back at countries that “cheated” us. It can't be all these as multiple elements contradict each other.
I’ll take my Fox News slot now please and thank you.
We can’t? Are south Florida, southern California, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, are they not “here”? There is literally a banana variety called California Gold.
Trump and his cabinet don't understand this.
That's what the CHIPS act did. Indeed, everyone talking about TSMC, Intel, etc -- that's all because of the CHIPS act.
Toddler tantrum tariffs, which in reality are a vehicle for massive level corruption (see how Vietnam got a "deal" by approving a Trump resort. Or how every business leader is stuck to Trump's anus lest they be targeted by his tyrant tantrums), are not an incentive. It has had the opposite effect, and new builds have basically dried up.
Consumption was likely mildly reduced (and still is with the 15% tax) but now we have more inflation coming our way when those billions start flowing and our debt just keeps going up.
Now if tariffs had only been applied to, I don't know, yachts, private jets…
Working class often live paycheck to paycheck. Unless rich are also living paycheck to paycheck I'm not sure I the two really compare.
That's of course the idea behind a progressive tax: it scales to what an individual "can afford".
The ironic part is not that you were mildly in favor from the left, the ironic part is that they came from the right.
Pre-Trump, the right was very anti-tariff and only a portion of the left was pro tariff, the Bernie Sanders type.
https://pettersen.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...
Even if there was a US version, you'd still pay more regardless. This goes against one of the main grievances in the 2024 cycle: prices are too high.
Our domestic manufacturing industry is so far gone, it's doubtful whether even skillfully-applied tariffs could encourage any of it to come back on their own. Never mind this clown show, which apparently didn't even do the basic political work to make sure the tariffs would stay in place more than a year, despite having both houses of Congress.
If your argument is that taxation at sale is harder to dogdge than with income, and thus an obviously regressive scheme would still be advantageous for the average American, then I'm not buying it at all.
I see no evidence whatsoever that the wealthy would have any more difficulty in dodging sales tax than income/capital gains taxes.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a more regressive tax scheme. Bill Gates and I consume approximately the same amount of resources. I don’t see why he should have to pay a significantly different rate than I do.
But I don't see the primary justification for taxes as "keeping consumption in check" (whatever that would mean for you): In my view, we pay taxes to keep our society functional.
Progressive taxation is required to prevent escalating wealth inequality (and I'd argue that US administrations have done a really poor here over the last decades).
Regressive taxes ruin society by nurturing pseudo-parasitic rent-seekers controlling most of the wealth (=> exaggerated for clarity), and the situation is already bad enough without allowing those to basically skip taxes.
No, this is the consequence of having an actual stupid person in the Oval Office and the majority party being half coerced and half committed in cultlike devotion to POTUS.
Obviously the US has economic weapons. It's the largest economy in the world.
If anything this signals that POTUS himself cannot wield those weapons though, and the American public, political, and business apparatuses have little appetite for this use of those weapons.
What specific pieces of evidence do you believe makes the former more likely than the latter?
+1 on nukes, though MAD has worked for decades so far. I agree people think this risk is far more remote than it actually is. Especially the risk of a catastrophic accident as nukes proliferate and forces get put on higher readiness.
There is a global cold/hot war where real pieces have moved. NATO is basically at war and we can’t know. There’s millions dying in Ukraine, and it’s basically Eurasia to us (virtualized, reported , broadcasted ).
Warships are being torpedoed. Nuclear subs from either side can’t be tracked, it is always a leveraged threat that one has to negotiate around.
Few are ready to live under 24 hour nuclear watch, but it’s possible that’s what many cities have been under and can never be told. Maybe I should just go ahead and write my great American novel?
Effectively every city on the planet is perpetually on 24 hour nuclear watch and has been for decades now. This is completely "known" to anyone who cares to know and has taken the time to understand modern nuclear doctrine.
You should read The Doomsday Machine! It'll help amp up your anxiety ;)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-...